Wednesday, February 04, 2015

Last month, at a local symposium on Christian faith and culture, I had the opportunity to listen to and learn from James K.A. Smith, a theologian and, lately, a valuable interpreter of the work of Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher whose writings have been very important to my own thinking. Smith's book How (Not) To Be Secular is a wonderfully helpful guide to Taylor's latest (and, quite likely, last) major work of philosophy and moral theory,A Secular Age--but I can't deny I found Smith's presentation and his book somewhat disconcerting, because it suggested to me that I may have misunderstood something pretty important about Taylor's philosophy. But I'm not sure about that, and I want to try to work out my thoughts here.

In my dissertation, I read Taylor's work primarily through a close examination of Johann Gottfried Herder, a late 18th-century German thinker who Taylor himself frequently seemed guided by--particularly in how he thought about language and meaning--but who also held to an ontological (in fact theological) conviction about the universe that appeared much stronger than Taylor's, or at least stronger than anything convictions that Taylor had chosen to share in his writings (I have to use the past tense, because I really haven't kept up on his work since the year 2000 or so). Herder's insistence that, through processes he labeled Einfühlung (a kind of empathetic listening to or "feeling into") and Besonnenheit (what might be called "reflective discernment"), the human mind was capable of naming and making poetic and moral use of certain organic verities which are immanently conveyed within and through all human history and language is, frankly, kind of mystical in a Heideggerian sort of way. But it also appealed to Taylor's desire to push back against a model of knowing which was committed to epistemological description, and instead think more communally and culturally about how we as persons know things, and what we can morally do with the things we know. Taylor's arguments about social and political life, from his moral anthropology to his claims about multiculturalism to his work on cultural toleration in his home province of Quebec, have all been shaped, I think, at least in part by Herder's particular approach to one of the essential problems of philosophy in modern pluralist societies: how to insist upon a unified standard of truth or identity or community while still respecting the fact of separateness or individuality? For Herder, the answer to that problem is found in an ontological claim that presents those aforementioned organic verities as reflecting the divine. Taylor doesn't go that far--as different scholars pointed out, Taylor's hermeneutics may be strong, but his ontology is weak. My conclusion was that Taylor's project gestured toward, but didn't fully lay out the terms of, what I called "immanent community": an idea that there can be, collectively realized from interpretive engagements with one's own historical and cultural traditions, bonds of attachment which are not merely localized expressions of morality, but authentic--if always evolving--connections to real moral truths.

Now given the tentativeness of much contemporary moral philosophy, that's actually an impressively firm communitarian conviction. Not Herderian in its religiosity, but certainly strong enough, I thought, to account for all the criticism Taylor received throughout the 80s and 90s from his more secular-minded colleagues. I'd hoped, when I heard that Taylor was working on a larger book to explore the sort of faithful "hunches" he talked about at the conclusion of Sources of the Self, to see him explore this theme of authentic-moral-communities-as-realized-through-affective-interpretation further...and perhaps, hidden (in plain sight?) within A Secular Age, that really is what he does. But from what I heard from Smith's presentation on Taylor and secularism, I wondered if my hopes were off-base. I came away from listening to Smith, and then from reading his book, wondering if Taylor's hermeneutics were actually "weaker"--or shall we say, less reflective and interpretive, less subjective or "Herderian"--and his ontology "stronger"--that is, more direct, more objective--than I'd long thought. That is, far from agreeing with Matthew Rose's interesting but ultimately rather silly attack on Taylor (which concludes that, by thoroughly and thoughtfully detailing contemporary secularism in terms of a self-enclosing "immanent frame," Taylor has made himself into "an apologist for...the secular status quo"), I'm finding myself intrigued by Smith's back-handed defense of him: that perhaps it would be "more consistent" with Taylor's own accounts of how we seek open ourselves up to the transcendent to push back against the sort of uncritically anthropocentric assumptions about human flourishing that undergird his arguments. Doing so, though, would, if not put the lie to, than at least greatly complicate my prior reading which presented Taylor's whole Herderian effort to work out a philosophical anthropology in terms of interpretively realized moral truths as a result of his determination to explain why subjecting the transcendent to the immanent (to make a twist on a very old and narrow theoretical joke which almost no one will get: the aim isn't to immanentize the eschaton, but to eschatize the immanent!) was a good thing, in that it historically allowed Christianity and moral philosophy to find a focus on "the practical primacy of life." Smith explicitly says that Taylor puts himself on the side of those "who might even say 'that modern unbelief is providential'"...and yet his treatment--as presented by Smith, anyway--of transcendence and the sublime seems to me to go beyond what I previously understood Taylor as saying: that--and here I'm using the words of Stephen K. White, another fine scholar of Taylor--"God as a moral source is now [in our secular age] inextricably entangled with subjective articulation."

I suppose I could just put all this on the shelf until that time, however many years hence, when I actually read A Secular Age for myself and come to my own judgments about what it ways, and what it means for how I should understand all of Taylor's previous writings. But in the meantime I've read something else, and it has intersected with my thinking about this philosophical problem in a complicated but, I think, interesting way.

Joseph Spencer is a Mormon philosopher and theologian; he's written a fine book--For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope--which looks closely at Christian and Mormon teachings about the virtue of hope, and connects that theme to the kind of transformative, utopian economic projects which, in our present capitalism age, almost no one can plausibly hope for, though that is what Mormons like myself are supposed to do. When I'd first encountered his work, I wasn't very impressed--but fortunately, I had a reason to re-read it, and when I did, a great number of connections seemed to leap out at me. In particular was Joe's investigation of the idea that far from being unreasonable to hope for things that are truly revolutionary, hope (at least as laid out by Paul and other New Testament authors) is in fact ineliminably connected to the unseen, unanticipated, and yet already assumed ideal. As Joe put it: "[Paul's emphasis] is, rather, an insistence that hope be oriented to the unseen but fully immanent anchor of the seen. Hope gains its strength neither from its rootedness in a constitutively invisible everywhere, nor from its orientation to an era yet to dawn, but instead from its attention to the complete lack of self-sufficiency invisibly inscribed in every created thing." Or, put more prosaically, and importing some Taylorian terminology: we here in the immanent frame of fragile belief and haunted doubts are called to hope for a transcendent event, not knowing in any sense what that transcendent event will involve or result it, but confident in its reality because that transcendent break-through is immanent to all creation.

Joe's arguments are narrowly focused; he doesn't present an anthropology of human existence, a history of religious belief, or an account of interpretation. But I found his narrow focus extremely illuminating in terms of this strange discontent I've had with Smith's presentation go Taylor's philosophical account of our secular moment. Joe's whole project is to get the Mormon faithful to think clearly about what it means--not just religiously, but also socially, economically, and ultimately (though he is ambivalent on this point) politically--to affirm a hope in something as revolutionary and ideal as a community where the ownership of private property (and thus the inequality which, in a world of both liberty and markets, would inevitably follow) is replaced by collective stewardship (and thus overall, if not absolute, equality). To say that you truly hope for the emergence of such an order of exchange and social relations is no easy thing. And by the same token, it seemed to me that the burden of Taylor's argument as I understood it was no easy thing--and that, perhaps, if my understanding of Smith's reading of Taylor is correct, and thus my interpretation was wrong, Smith is making Taylor's work a little bit easier.

I don't mean to suggest that Smith himself sees Taylor's teachings as simplistic or easy in themselves; he clearly recognized the obvious truth that they aren't. Nor do I think Smith is pulling "easy" answers out of Taylor's work--it's quite clear from Smith'swritings that he sees the argument about how one is to understand the possibilities for acknowledging transcendence in today's secular world as demanding a great deal of attentiveness and thoughtful work, recognizing that God may be attempting to meet us in our social embededness, and in our own disenchantment. So no, it's not easy in the sense of telling all who doubt to look for a revelation which will overwhelm our own subjectivity. But I really do wonder if this presentation of the problem and our historical response to it isn't at least a little more straightforward than I'd originally believed. It reads to me as a kind of reception, not as a kind of co-creation. Part of what makes Herder's writings so maddeningly elusive at times is that he's attempting to describe how he can believe that we, in all our profound and very diverse historicity and individuality, are nonetheless actively realizing the singular meaning of things. It's a metaphysically heavy claim, almost Hegelian in its weight, yet one inseparably wrapped up with our own subjective cultural and poetic creations. To put it another way, I had understood Taylor, in light of how I'd understood Herder, as tying his moral realism to engaged acts of interpretation, because that engagement--with all its practical attention to human flourishing--in fact itself is the revelation that many feel haunts our secular moment. While now I wonder if actually we're best understood more as receivers than creators; that our engagement is more a matter of attending and waiting, rather than of sub-creation. (Smith's admiration for Rod Dreher's arguments about believers exercise the "Benedict Option" and waiting out the inevitable transformations around us--"waiting for St. Francis" as Rod has repeatedly put it--is perhaps revealing here.) Transcendence meets us, and we need to recognize it in its arrival...which I recognize as laying out a difficult philosophical (not to mention pastoral!) task, but still, it's not quite the same as saying, as I'd originally understood Taylor as arguing, that we are in the unenviable (or is it enviable?) position of needing to do the collective work to naming transcendence for what it is, and articulating the terms of our meeting of it.

Reading Joe's book put me in mind of an old discussion hosted by James Faulconer, a brilliant philosopher (and, I learned during last month's conference, a friend of James K.A. Smith) who, at different points separated by a decade or two, taught both Joe and I at BYU. Jim wanted to get people's thoughts about this essay by John Milbank, in which he explores what it would mean for Christians to seriously challenge the idolatrous marketplace which defines most of the fundamental social realities experienced by just about everyone in the modern West. Milbank's conclusion is to call the inhabitants of Western modernity (which, perhaps not coincidentally, is exactly the audience of Taylor's work) to exercise some hope in a gift economy--or what he has referred to elsewhere as "socialism by grace." My own response to Milbank is here, and I can't deny that it was somewhat intriguing, and maybe even a little gratifying, to realize that a full ten years on, the very same issues which are troubling me here were troubling me there. Milbank wants us to orient ourselves towards that transcendence which breaks apart what Taylor rightly calls--as quoted by Smith--the "terrible flatness....with [our] commercial, industrial, or consumer society." An order where production and exchange partakes of genuine love and authenticity, not the reductive grit of self-interest--an order where the economy (meaning here the whole panoply of modern life) is oriented around something higher something which in the Mormon traditions is labeled "consecrated." Joe wants this to, and Taylor and Smith are arguing about how we can make our ways to the point of being able to hope for and work towards such. Milbank, having laid out his arguments, turns towards the end of his essay to a serious of harsh attacks against the modern liberal state, contrasting it to the "liberality" that only a collectively received community may enable. I agreed with practically every step he made in that argument--but ultimately couldn't understand why he was so certain that there needed to transformation in the political (and by extension, I would argue, the interpretive) tools available to us in order to engage properly in the sort of hopeful work he claimed which Christianity calls us to. As I wrote towards the end of my response, thinking of all sorts of different populist political movements and reforms, "there are tools available to work towards the theological politics which Milbank assumes (rightly, I think) our belief in the Kingship of Christ to make incumbent upon us." I still believe that--and when I read Taylor and Herder, I thought I was seeing a way to understand how it is that such interpretive tools are also, despite--or perhaps because of--their decidedly quotidian, anthropocentric, practical character--immanent realizations of transcendence. And here I am essentially just quoting Martin Luther King, or Dorothy Day, or Tommy Douglas, or William Jennings Bryan, or any of the old Christian socialists: the bringing of people together into even such a crude instrument as a protest march or worker's union or a co-op is itself the kind of consecrated and transcendent hope which we believers ought to be about.

In the end, I suppose all this just can't get away from the simple fact that I am suspicious of anything which seems to point towards a quietist reception of that which will enable a transformation of our communities in and through which we live, rather that the always-interpretive struggle to build--and thereby transform--those communities. My taste for democratic governance is both agonistic and process-oriented, in that way: I think interpretive confusion is not only an entirely ordinary and to-be-expected way of life, but that it is in and through such interpretive confusion that moral meanings and truths and realities are named and made. Our every transcendent revelation will turn out to have been an always-already immanent and communal co-creation, I think. I suspect that not a single one of the phenomenologically inclined folks I've referenced in this too-long post--Herder, Taylor, Smith, Joe, anyone--would take issue with that formulation; they just might disagree with me on the interpretive work and hope bringing it about involves. Those more sensitive to the need for patient attendance upon that which may be interpretively realized have taught be a lot, over the years; I'm far more local and variable and (I hope) humble in my sense of where and in what form the transcendent might appear to guide us towards more equal communities than I once was. But at the same time, I'm still pretty convinced that such moments of transcendent justice will be, nonetheless, built. If it turns out that my best philosophical understanding of what such hopeful building consists of was wrong, well, it'll mean I need to some more thinking. I'm not sure it will change my mind, though. Maybe I'm just stubborn that way.

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."